The other day I heard someone say; “I don’t understand the hurry of all these people, we’ll all reach the finish line one day anyway, whether we hurry or not.”
Have you noticed that too? How sometimes people are stressed even when it doesn’t serve a purpose ? Caught up in a traffic jam or train delay with the certainty they will be late and yet they keep looking at their watch?
The thing is though that constantly looking at a watch won’t cure the delay or slow down time, on the contrary, it only confirms the stress and stalls everything else that goes on at the same time.
When you’re stressed you can’t think of anything else.
All that occupies your mind is the stressor, that which makes you feel stressed.
So not only does stress cause you to be anxious, it also debilitates everything else going on in your life, as you have no energy left to direct towards other things.
Being late for an appointment is only an easy example in this context.
It also goes for being stressed over a relationship, financial problems, health issues, worries over children, parents or friends. Once we are stressed over something, anything at all, human beings are programmed in such a way that all energy is directed towards that which causes the stress.
This behavior originates from our hunter and gatherer days when an attack from a saber tooth tiger still required all of our attention, leaving no time for other issues.
The problem with this spontaneous reflex however is that the world today offers many more stressors on a daily basis than the occasional saber tooth. Time frames, deadlines, in fact the invention of the watch itself, the workings of economy, money issues, bills, stockexchange, morgages, alimonies, they are all little saber toothes, or should I say saber teeth in themselves.
How to de-stress, so that you are able to function again in other fields of life, when a stressor occupies your mind, may well be one of the biggest health issues of the era we live in today
For apart from taking up time and personal space, stress also affects your immune system, for the simple reason that all of your resilience is directed towards the stressor leaving the rest of body, mind and spirit unguarded against other invasions of the nervous system.
Now lets see this as a learning curve. Today, I invite you to think of a personal cure against stress. We all have different Tools in life. For one person curing stress might mean a walk past the shoreline, for the other taking a stiff glass of wine and for a third to sit down and meditate.
The first requirement is to realize you can actually actively weapon yourself against modern day Saber-teeth simply by becoming aware of the phenomenon.
The fact that the beach walk might be healthier than the stiff glass of wine is secondary.
Just think, what you, you personally yourself, so that’s you, could do to diminish stress in your life.
I wish you creative thinking.
